My configuration

I work at a company whose product builds and runs exclusively on Linux.
Like most sane people, I prefer to live in a more user-friendly operating
system and my laptop runs Mac OSX. To build my company's product, I use
VMWare Fusion to run an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. I use a local GUI to
edit and search source code, only using the virtual machine to compile
and test the built product.

Until recently, I kept the files on my virtual machine in sync
with the files on the host machine by using VMWares hgfs kernel module,
which allows a guest to access files on the host (and vice versa).
This configuration causes me no end of grief -- the open-vm-tools ubuntu
package does not include hgfs so I have to manually compile and install
VMWare's tools. This sometimes
breaks and needs
to be recompiled every time I update my kernel.

HGFS performance issues

On top of this, the VMWare HGFS has some serious performance issues.
Yesterday, I got fed up with the fact that my incremental builds were
slower than my colleagues and started doing a performance investigation.
An incremental build in which no files were changed after a successful
build took almost 10 seconds. I noticed my system had incredibly high
CPU utilization and generated a
Flame Graph:

I was amazed -- all the HGFS stacks were spending time blocked in
mutex_spin_on_owner. It looks like all file accesses have
to go through a filesystem-wide global lock!